Form Following Function

Form ever follows function. With those few words, Louis Sullivan sparked a movement that reshaped American cities in the 20th century and continues to reverberate into the 21st. It’s also a phrase many learning leaders are coming to terms with.

Sullivan was a seminal architect during a particularly exciting time. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, American cities were undergoing a dramatic boom as waves of European immigrants crashed ashore and rural residents headed to the city in search of work. Faced with growing demand from booming businesses, architects responded with entirely new ways to design and construct buildings.

Until the late 1800s, architects’ ability to build upward was constrained by the need for massive exterior walls to support the weight of a tall building. That all changed with the completion of William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building in 1885. The 10-story Chicago building, acknowledged as the world’s first skyscraper, soared to more than 182 feet and would be the first of many tall, multi-storey buildings to spring up across the country.

The breakthrough innovation of Jenney and his contemporaries was to shift the building’s load-bearing responsibility away from the walls to a rigid steel skeleton. Sullivan proved to be a master of this new building style with the completion of his Wainwright Building in St. Louis in 1891.

But Sullivan’s central idea — the one that made him a transformational figure — was that a building’s physical structure (form) should closely match its purpose (function). Rather than get wrapped up in extravagant possibilities, Sullivan used the new-found architectural techniques to pioneer simple, functional designs. With the Wainwright Building, Sullivan accentuated the structure’s height with massive vertical bands that separated columns of large windows. He opened up the interior with a flood of natural light. Despite its mass, the building was designed on a human scale.

Learning and development professionals find themselves at a similar historical moment to Sullivan and his contemporaries. Traditional classroom learning continues its steady decline as technology-enabled learning rises. New forms of delivery are emerging that allow CLOs to scale development in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. Liberated from the classroom, learning professionals are fusing social networking technology with the power of informal learning and collaboration.